If you’ve ever written something in length – a novel, a movie script, a years long blog series about a long running television show – it can seem like it becomes your reality. I have a couple unpublished manuscripts sitting around that, when I was immersed in writing them, they felt real. Like I knew the characters personally. I knew their lives. Their thoughts. Their inevitable ruin. Today’s episode of The X-Files, Milagro, is about such an experience to varying degrees of success.
Writer’s block is a beast, let me tell you. It ruins your motivation. Makes you feel as though you’re a terrible writer. It’s like having a bad drawing day – only it can last weeks. Anxiety settles in as you wonder if inspiration will ever return. I suppose that was what fledgling author Phillip Padgett (John Hawkes) was experiencing at the beginning of his episode when he went into his bathroom and removes his bloody heart. Figuratively, of course, but you get the idea.
Later, after the man throws a bag of garbage into his building’s basement incinerator and is on his way back to his apartment, Scully encounters him as she walks into the elevator. She finds riding in silence in the elevator unsettling....